Haunani-Kay Trask : PRACTICE QUESTION 2 : What is your mission as a teacher within the context of an institution of higher education?

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Transcript

Yeah, I think part of the reason I always have run into difficulties with administration is because they see almost in a more focused way what I'm trying to do. There's no mistaking what my mission is. They know very well that I'm here to train people to resist. They know that. That's why they kept trying to remove me during that whole period in the '80s. They know. It's not lost on the Democratic Party, or the administration of the university, or the administration of the State of Hawaiʻi and what my mission is. 

What's lost is - if it's lost on anyone - is that we should all be doing this. There shouldn't be one Haunani-Kay Trask. There should be hundreds of them. What is wrong with all you people in political science, in the College of Ed, in all these places? What's the matter with all these people? They should be engaged in decolonizing their students' minds,(1) but they're not. They're engaged in what education is "supposed" to be in a university - just prepare everybody to go right into society and get their jobs and continue the class nature of knowledge and of production.

I don't happen to believe that. I think the whole purpose of a university is to change the way people understand their environment - social, cultural, political. That puts me at odds with the administration of the University of Hawaiʻi - always - and by extension with the governor's office. My purpose is to make students open up their minds and their eyes and their hearts. And how do you do that? You put them into a contradictory relationship with the powers that be. That's the whole purpose of education. You sort of uncover the lies about democracy, for example. Oh boy, what a big fake that is!

Well, there isn't a Hawaiian student who walks into my class that doesn't already know about the overthrow.(2) People could go through their whole lives when I was in high school and never hear about the overthrow. Never! Didn't even know it happened! That's not possible now, thanks to us.

So I really do believe that education liberates the mind. I don't know that it liberates anything else, but… Of course, I'm a believer that if you understand your condition, you're in a better position to interact with it, to change it, to increase your participation in it. But if you don't understand, then you really are... what's that great expression? You're making your own history, but without consciousness...

Notes

(1) Decolonizing the mind: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o introduced this critical concept in his revolutionary work of the same name.  He argued there that:

The real aim of colonialism was to control the people’s wealth: what they produced, how they produced it, and how it was distributed; to control, in other words, the entire realm of the language of real life. Colonialism imposed its control of the social production of wealth through military conquest and subsequent political dictatorship.  But its most important area of domination was the mental universe of the colonised, the control, through culture, of how people perceived themselves and their relationship to the world. Economic and political control can never be complete or effective without mental control. To control a people’s culture is to control their tools of self-definition in relationship to others. (Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. London: James Currey Ltd., Nairobi: EAEP,  and Portsmouth, New Hampshire:  Heinemann, 1997. page 16.)

For Ngũgĩ, preserving one’s Native culture (language, literature, etc.) in opposition to the dominant culture is central to resistance. Decolonization is never just political or institutional. To be successful, it must also be culturally based.

(2) The overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi:The U.S. military in support of a small group of white businessmen overthrew the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi in 1893. In 1898, the United States annexed Hawaiʻi, without a popular vote and against the expressed wishes of the Hawaiian people. Today, Hawaiians are wards of the federal and state governments.

Excerpt from Racism Against Native Hawaiians at the University of Hawaiʻi: A Personal and Political View.

[The] denial to faculty of the role of the "public intellectuals" is one of the most serious abridgements now taking place in universities. Of all the institutions in society, the university is the one which has an obligation to analyze, criticize, and provoke in the public realm. Without this, the role of the "public intellectual" will be filled with gadflies, entrepreneurs, or publicity hounds. And the function of public criticism will pass from the university altogether.

This brings me to a last point, which is, as well, a beginning: resistance. More than verbal disagreement, resistance takes organization, planning, and a tenacity that develops and sustains individual and group capacities. For women of color, especially those who are very public in their positions as intellectuals and as activists, there is no other alternative other than struggle. Without it, institutions wear us down by petty bureaucratic procedures and the force of inertia.

As someone who has persevered over the years, I can truthfully say that resistance is its own reward.

(Haunani-Kay Trask, From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawaiʻi,  revised edition. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1999. pages 167-168.)